The Fleishman Moms Know Exactly Why They're In Trouble
Or maybe I should say "we"
Fair warning: It’s Tuesday, I have deadlines to meet, and I just brain dumped all of this in like 2 hours. I’m not editing it, I’m sorry. This is in response to The Fleishman Effect, which ran on The Cut yesterday.
Here’s the rundown: I grew up poor and am no longer poor. As a kid, I lived in a series of rental houses in first the eastern and then northern suburbs of Atlanta. Some of them were shittier than others, some were attached to men who wouldn’t end up being in our lives long, at least one had a pretty bad mold problem, and the one we lived in longest (3 years when I was in high school) had just plywood floors. I think we were homeless once, but my mom, a bartender for most of my childhood, wouldn’t have ever copped to that. We always ate, but often that meant writing a bad check to the pizza delivery guy. Things were stressful but survivable. Now I’m 36, have lived most of the last decade in NYC and SF, and now live in Westchester, about 45 minutes north of the city. Just a quick account of some facts. This will get less clinical soon.
I have one son, who is 10. When he was born, I worked as a freelance writer and we were on food stamps. When he was 2 and I was 27, I moved with him (alone, sans boyfriend) to NYC to take a job at Bustle, which was a brand new media startup then. I was making $88,000—a previously unimaginable figure in my life—which I quickly realized, rent and preschool considered, still meant I would be going actively into debt for the next few years until my kid started public pre-k. The math of raising a child with commutable proximity to my office (first in Williamsburg, later Chelsea) didn’t add up from the minute our NYC life started, but then, I knew it wouldn’t. Agreeing to this was the first step in a larger plan to make enough money for the numbers to start reconciling more easily. It was a process. Being a young single mom in NYC, the math was supposed to start upside down, so I didn’t sweat it. The first few years were so brutally taxing; it’s not even worth going into.
I’ll skip ahead: after a few years in media (long enough to see the possible ceiling on how much money I could ever reasonably expect to make there), I started figuring out how to repackage my skills to be marketable in more lucrative roles in different industries, which I got better at and more experienced at year over year. I made progressively more money and found new ways to take on contract work that amounted to multiple (sometimes 2; sometimes 4) full-time jobs at once. When the pandemic hit, I spent a year paying my youngest sister and her now-husband to manage my then-3rd grader’s remote school situation and help him film movies and make pizza dough and generally make his life feel like a life while I spent 12 hours a day letting my jobs siphon off every brain cell I had to keep all of us financially afloat in the $3,500/month San Francisco apartment we were all sharing (with one bathroom!) It was for my kid’s benefit, for my benefit, for their benefit (I didnt want them to have to work their old service industry jobs in these pre-vaccine days)—it’s just what needed to happen. And none of it worked unless I kept doing what I was doing, working like I was working. By the time my doctor benched me from working out because my body was starting to short out from the stress I was putting on it from all fronts—over-working, chaotically parenting, and manically exercising to cope with the working and parenting—I barely noticed that I was on track for a $300,000 year. Well, I noticed but that’s all you could say for it. I felt a little less scared that everything was going to fall apart of all of us, and hey, when you’ve spent a lot of your life feeling like everything could financially fall apart for everyone at any minute, being unburdened of that fear to some degree wasn’t just nice—it was wildly addictive. I was hooked.
The core dilemma when it comes to earning money and spending it on supporting your basic life requirements always came down to geography for me. It wasn’t complicated: although I’ve spent some of my career with the flexibility to work remotely doing work that can entirely be done remotely, before the pandemic, there was still the expectation that I show up in person most, if not all, of the time. Because the “right” jobs were largely based in NYC and SF, and because I had a kid, there were always going to be some years where the tension between money in and money out would be barely navigable—but in theory, this would end. Supposedly, I would reach a point where I was making enough that living in these places wouldn’t keep me in a persistent financial panic. And in order to get there, I would have to endure the tight, terrifying, exhausting years in between, because I physically had to be there to take the jobs that would get me to the other side. I signed on for those years and that awful tension where there simply would not be enough money. I would survive it. I knew how to be poor! It would feel weird to be making six figures and be functionally poor, but whatever, I can’t fix all the world’s evils. I CAN make cheap magic for my little kid and have a fun time on a budget.
What never occurred to me when I signed on for those years before I started making “enough” money to not be stressed was how the persistent stress of not having enough for all those years in between would change my relationship to work, to money, to providing for my family; how it would change my relationship to the concept of “enough”; how it might remove from my body the ability to feel safe and protected or to feel that I had enough money in the bank for my kid to be safe and protected, no matter how much I made or saved. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t know the pursuit of “enough money” would make it impossible or me to ever feel like I’d gotten there—or that it would make it impossible for me to dial back the intensity of the pursuit, not matter how many benchmarks of security I blew past.
By the end of 2021, after a much longer layover in SF than I’d ever intended, I found myself pouring every penny I had into a down payment on a beautiful mid-century house about 45 minutes north of NYC in Westchester. It cost just under $1 million dollars, and my new mortgage payment was around $6,400 per month. To address the common and very reasonable argument that we “could just move somewhere cheaper” well sure, yes, but I had to be here, in this expensive place, to get the jobs that would afford me that abundantly comfortable life in a smaller, cheaper city, but by the time that became an option, my whole life was here. My kid’s life was here. That’s not nothing! I grew up poor but I also grew up moving all the time, having no consistency with my friends, enduring the perpetual in-fighting in our family that left my sisters and I with ultimately no one but each other for most of our childhood. I not only wanted to give my kid a more financially comfortable life, but also to create an environment for him where meaningful, long-lasting relationships with all kinds of people in his life could take root and become load-bearing structures in his life from his earliest days. I would do both. It was as good a sense of purpose as any.
But doing it was wearing me down to, at times, a degree that I had to clearly wonder if it might kill me. By the time we closed on the house, I was already creeping up on what would become my 2nd major burnout/breakdown episode in 5 years. My heart was beating irregularly and far too slowly; my period stopped and started erratically; I had recurrent miscarriages (because I wasn’t taking on enough, I decided to try to have a baby—insane and my body was simply not having it); I couldn’t eat a lot of food; sleep was bad of course. My cheeky little underlying OCD became expansive, deafening, and voracious for new parts of my life to infect. It was all pretty bad on the health front, but I had a great backyard and an easy train ride to the city, not that I ever had the time or energy to go. The reasons for all of this aren’t original, but they are cumulative: for the achievement of successfully constructing a life for my kid (and whatever combination of my sisters and their loved ones who might ever need to lean on it) in a markedly higher economic bracket than the one I grew up in, I was rewarded with the crushing pressure of keeping us all there. Because that’s the awful thing about making a lot of money when your life doesn’t rest on an existing foundation of existing money — if you choose to build your life at a price point that’s aligned with how much you make, you will always have to make more or else risk backsliding. And if your body’s first understanding of the world was predicated on never having enough of the basic resources needed to live, is often interpreted by your core, animal body as something like death, for you and everyone you love. Backsliding might not be considered an option by the kind of strivers who care about social status and its material trappings, but to the strivers who just don’t ever want to be poor again, backsliding is really not a fucking option. So the pressure to keep working at an ever-higher level is…a lot.
There were a few specific things about The Cut’s piece about the Fleishman moms that rang too true for comfort, but more than anything else, it was Beth—not Twitter’s favorite this week, may the lord keep her—and her desperate longing for a bathtub that her $300,000 income can’t seem to afford her.
The minute we bought our house—gorgeous, old, full of bad pipes and inexplicable lighting fixtures—my singular preoccupation was envisioning the ideal version of itself I would turn it into over the coming years with totally imaginary money that I had not made yet. One of the two full bathrooms had such a fucked up plumbing situation (I won’t bore you) that it was perpetually filled with septic smell (for the uninitiated: bad) and unusable—and it has the only bathtub in the house. We’ve been here 14 months and still don’t use it because we don’t have the money to renovate, which means we haven’t had a bath in all that time. I don’t think this bothers me as much as it bothers Beth, but I mean, I read that and was like “i get that” which quickly unfurled into a fully unwanted examination of how much I do and don’t have in common with the Fleishman moms, and then I started furiously writing this in my Notes app and now we’re here and it’s everyone’s problem.
Like any former poor kid, it’s still the baseline identify with which I react to anything I experience (including having money, but more on that in a minute). So when I read The Cut piece, I read it with an automatic distance from the women who were the subjects of the story specifically, and the type of woman who were the subject broadly. I’m nothing like those rich, NYC, striver moms, who are, of course, out of touch, very fucking far from the light, and should just send their kids to public school. Except, in any light, at this point, a lot of the material conditions of our lives look the same. A lot of the anxieties they express mirror some of my own. A lot about them does not feel familiar or relatable at all. But if you look at me, where I live, my tax return, the things I desire and the hot urgency I live with to go out and get them—I don’t know, the math adds up. I’m kind of a Fleishman mom. Or rather, I’m one kind of Fleishman mom.
Here’s how it works: When your basic material needs are met, and the layer of desires right on top of that, and the one on top of that; when you have successfully attained not only everything you need but most things you want, a vacuum opens up inside you. And sure, you always expected it it to. But what you don’t expect is that, instead of that vacuum being filled by joy or fulfillment or satisfaction or whatever, it’s filled by any or all of the following: the desire for new things or a meandering anxiety caused by all the energy that used to be devoted to the pursuit of the thing you have, that your body simply doesn’t know how to turn off and might never be able to turn off; a constant flow of energy that, without the act of striving to burn through, might just set you on fire instead, leaving you terrified, empty, and on fire because all you’ve trained your body to do is voraciously pursue a comfortable life but never how to actually experience comfort within it.
This, as far as I can tell, is the condition of people who have obtained money, and it’s very different from people who have always had money that they never needed to personally obtain. Those people, they probably know how to enjoy it. They probably know how to relax. Comfort and pleasure were written onto their nervous systems from day one, and you know what, god bless. Enjoy yourselves and try not to damage too many other people along the way. But for the strivers, the people for whom getting more money means having to actually work more, produce more, put in more of themselves, there’s a wall you hit: there’s no level of income that feels like “enough”—insomuch as “enough” is a theoretical point at which you feel liberated from the desire for more, which as we’ve already discussed, doesn’t ever happen because your body and brain have been conditioned by the relentless pursuit of “enough” to be fundamentally incapable of recognizing it, let along settling into it—but there absolutely is a point at which the body begins to break.
And you realize that, whatever the market value for the particular things you offer the market in exchange for money, you are at the ceiling of how much you’re able to produce without literally dying. Your physical and mental health are paper thin (which also, for fun, means that on top of the pressure to maintain everything you’ve built for yourself and your loved ones is a new fear that you will simply collapse permanently and be unable to take another step), giving you equally little fortitude for either of the two options in front of you: keep earning more or learn the new skill of being happy where you are, which certainly will first mean traversing a horrifying landscape of your own built-up psycho-bullshit, anxieties, and probably hangups about mortality itself.
You don’t have the fortitude for either of those things, so you just like, quietly panic every day and watch yourself deteriorate, all the while feeling like you “can’t complain” because you have objectively more than anyone “needs” by any measure that’s decent, but of course, no one knows that better than you do, no one feels like more of a dumbass for getting this far down this road, for falling prey to the objectively false idea that making more money would lead to a more enjoyable life when your better mind—which does, in fact, exist, mostly to mock you at this point—always knew that it would not, and now here you are, every nerve fried beyond repair, minimal capacity for pleasure, zero capacity for peace, and no one’s pity, not even your own.
I don’t really have much to say about the women quoted in the story, because anything I could say would hinge on assumptions about what background informs their present anxieties, some of which (not the cartier bracelet, wtf) superficially resemble a lot of my own. The only thing I could think when I read it was: I wonder how many of them made money and how many of them have always had it. For the ones who always had it or who married into it, I don’t know, I guess it’s all about status and the petty, insane competitions that fuel it. Whatever their demons are that keep them caring about that shit, I don’t really get it. I would like to think if copious money was simply a fact of life as I knew it, and having it didn’t depend on my capacity to produce anything, I would luxuriate in that for all of my days or put my energy into trying to make the world less miserable for more people. I don’t know, I really just can’t relate to that at all, so what can I say.
But for the Fleishman moms who earned their money, who don’t have a financial safety net other than their own ability to keep showing up and producing each day, I kept wondering if they know, like I do, that in our determined pursuit of a financially comfortable life for ourselves and our families, we might’ve broken our very capacity for experiencing comfort when it becomes available to us. We bought into something that was definitively unable to ever lead us to the happiness we wanted (sometimes it would give us pleasurable stimulation but never happiness or even unmedicated sleep)—and by the time we realized just how wrong we go it, we were already too far gone, hardwired for striving and nothing else. It’s painful to keep going this way but more painful to stop.
This doesn’t mean I think that having earned money, as opposed to having lucked into it, means I’m excused from condemnation at times when i’m being an out-of-touch, self-involved, myopic bore who loses perspective of my relative comfort and good fortune, both of which i have in spades. I’m an asshole sometimes too. This isn’t about how I’m excused from criticism when I’m just as bad as the women in the Cut story—it’s about how starting without money makes you particularly vulnerable to the largely empty promises we’re told about what making money will mean.
This does not end with me having figured out some solution for all of this, other than just slowly trying to extricate myself. And not being too hard on myself because, I mean, when I was a kid, the only thing that made my circumstances bearable was the certain idea that I would leave them, was inevitably going to leave them, was leaving them actively with every day that passed. And this—*gestures sweepingly to the past 18 years*—is what leaving looked like. It couldn’t have gone any other way for me. I had to break myself open to make some money in order to learn that it would, in fact, fix a lot of problems, but it would also create a bunch of new ones. That’s show biz, baby.
At this point, when the familiar urge to take on a new work thing pops up—when I find myself calculating how much more I could earn this year if I added something else to my plate—I do my best (my inconsistent best!) to call it out for the self-destructive tendency it is and re-focus my attention on trying to repair my ability to connect with the very real pleasures and joys that are available to me, to not hide from the impermanence and precarious nature of it all by burying myself in work that I know will not save me from any of the things I fear. But that’s hard. It would be easier to stage mom my kid into a prestigious school or go hard after a promotion or a book deal or whatever. It would genuinely be easier. Maybe a bath would help.